[OSM-talk] [Talk-GB] "Unsurfaced road" and "Byway"?

[Ulf Lamping]

Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Hi Ulf,
>   
>> Interestingly, you took approved tags that were approved less than a 
>> month or so - do you think a freshly approved tag will appear a thousand 
>> times a day after it was appoved?
>>     
> I think he does. Many people don't view the "approval" process as a
> *prerequisite* to a tag being used. 
ACK. I was using shop=Baumarkt long before shop=doityourself was 
approved - no problem.
> So it could very well be the case
> that a proposal is set up for a tag that is already widely used.
>   
Right. But even a tag that's widely used doesn't necessarily mean it's a 
good tag - as I've mentioned before.

And possibly having shop=diy, shop=doityourself and shop=do_it_yourself 
more than a thousand times each doesn't make me think that we should 
have all three of them in the map features.
>> So all is well now? "I got it rendered and I don't mind if anyone else 
>> has a problem with it - or don't understand it" - you mean this kind of 
>> solution?
>>     
> What's wrong with this? It's a Wiki, the others can change it
The renderer is not a wiki AFAIK ;-)
>> This sounds pretty well, until you think about actually gonna *use* the 
>> data. It's probably no fun to write a renderer for the 20000 possible 
>> variations of 200 tag's (not to mention that it's ugly, hard to 
>> understand, error prone, and slower to work with) - as a result for not 
>> doing some proposal work "at the beginning".
>>     
> Well you just write the renderer for the tags you think are
> interesting, and let those who think other tags are interesting add
> these to the renderer. He who writes the renderer has no obligation to
> detect the 20000 different tags in the planet file and try to find out
> what people meant by them.
>   
Please read it like that: 200 tags with lot's of variations meaning 
exactly the same.

One example already mentioned would be: shop=doityourself, shop=diy, 
shop=DIY, shop=do_it_yourself, shop=do-it-yourself, 
amenity=doityourself, amenity=diy, shop=hardware & type=diy, 
shop=Baumarkt, ... Maybe each has an equal "market share", so this might 
be the "state of the art" for a long time.

What should an "external program" do?!? It has no chance even to know 
all those variants! And every other program has to learn this crap over 
and over again - just because we cannot agree on a common tag ...
> There's no central command here and if there was, I'd quit.
> (Well at least central command is pulling the strings silently.)
>   
Well, looking at the (rapidly changing) list of people actually working 
on the proposals, I can't see any "central command" - maybe a few people 
concentrating on these topics.
>> And IMHO it's a much better way to think about possible problems first, 
>> solve them (where possible) and then use a tag - in comparison to first 
>> get a plethora of similiar tags and try to sort it out later. People get 
>> pretty unflexible once they have used a tag for a while so fixing this 
>> pletora later is difficult or even impossible in OSM ...
>>     
> On the other hand, using a tag in practice will often yield some
> insights that pure drawing-board discussions might not provide.
>   
(Most of?) the proposals comes out of practice "I wanted to tag xy and 
couldn't find a ..." is where most people start from.
> There's really no reason why you cannot start tagging something as you
> like it, 
Yes, I did exactly that for some tags.
> then play around with the renderers, 
hmmm, not everyone has SVN access and understands what to change in the 
renderer / is able to set up it's own renderer!
> sort out the problems
> and then make a proposal based on your experience
In fact most of the time this is exactly the way it goes (except for the 
renderer part).
>  (or even not make a
> proposal but answer questions on the mailing list with "well I tend to
> tag these things so-and-so..."). 
>   
Which is a bit strange: To have some recommended tags and not mention 
them on this list but only recommend them on request?!?
> Sometimes if you have worked with one thing and have had situations
> where it somehow didn't look right, you might be much more open to
> suggestions by other people!
>   
That's *usually* the case when I do a new proposal myself ;-)

Most proposals I did was changed more than once because I didn't took 
the right english word, forgot some details, got the wrong scope, ...

So the proposals were improved to a much better level - I thought they 
were already good right from the start ...

Regards, ULFL